Earth Energy Balance

Every meteorology student learns the energy balance model in their first year, and it never really leaves. You stop noticing it's there. Talk about a storm system, a heatwave, a warming trend, and somewhere underneath is the same equation: incoming solar radiation against outgoing thermal radiation, and whatever sits between them, albedo, greenhouse gases, determines the temperature. It becomes background knowledge you reference without meaning to.

This tool exists because that equation is usually taught as a diagram. Arrows in, arrows out, a box labeled "atmosphere." Useful, but static. I wanted something you could actually push on, change the albedo, raise the CO₂, and watch the temperature respond in real time, so the relationship stops being something you memorize and becomes something you can feel move.

I built it in Streamlit, which was new to me at the time. The honest reason is that it was the right tool for what this needed to be. A simplified zero-dimensional model doesn't need a full-stack application behind it, and building one anyway would have missed the point entirely. Streamlit gets an interactive interface running on top of Python fast, and Python was already my language for the physics side. There was no case for anything heavier.

The model itself is deliberately simple. Zero-dimensional, no spatial variation, no time dependence, equilibrium assumed instantly rather than modeled as a process. Real climate models spend enormous computational effort on exactly what this one skips. That's not a shortcoming here, it's the design. This was never meant to compete with an actual climate model, it's meant to be the thing that makes the equation behind those models legible before someone's ready for the complexity.

If I rebuilt this now, I wouldn't stay this cautious. I'd extend it into a proper learning tool, other models sitting alongside the energy balance one, more of the underlying physics made visible rather than assumed. Still not a running simulation, I don't have servers sitting around for that, still UI responding to parameter changes rather than genuine computation. But built with more intention toward actually landing the concept, not just demonstrating that it exists. The core idea hasn't changed: this is the tool I wish existed when I was first learning why the sun is the answer to almost every question about climate.

For more on the Earth Energy Balance Model, please watch: